Photo: Staging area near Cambodian border, 1970.
This April marks the 50th Anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War—a conflict that continues to shape much of American life in politics, military strategy, culture, race relations, and society more broadly. The Vietnam War casts its long shadow over the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy, and the Cold War environment surrounding the war seems to have reoriented around new geo-strategic and ideological concerns, making it necessary to grapple with the past to better understand the present diplomatic climate.
Critics of the American intervention in Vietnam claim that policy makers in Washington dragged the country into an unnecessary, unwanted, and immoral war. In contrast, a small group of scholars and military leaders offer a spirited defense of American intervention. A careful examination of myriad original sources reveals that neither view is entirely accurate and that the interplay of motivations and responses was far more complicated than most accounts suggest.
This site, developed around the course materials for Robert Brigham’s first-year seminar on the Vietnam War at Vassar, offers visitors an opportunity to examine some of those sources, including numerous official documents. Brigham was one of the first American scholars given access to Hanoi’s archives on the war. Included here are his translations of some of the Hanoi documents, offered for examination and study.